OTIS —If Democrats don’t mend fences out here amid the sprawling fields and crowded cattle barns of Colorado’s Eastern Plains, their hopes for the 2016 presidential race and U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet’s re-election could be swept away in the withering high prairie wind.

Democrats, who haven’t done well in rural regions for quite some time, were remarkably trounced in November.

So it’s no surprise Democrats and Republicans are attaching the term “rural Colorado” to a raft of bills in the current legislative session, even to bills that apply just as much to cities much larger than the 500 people of Otis.

The goal of such measures is to win backing for Democrats or solidify support for Republicans out here where residents remember a bitter 2013 legislative session more than any of the bills introduced this session — folks who say they have grown tired of Front Range politicians meddling with how they live their lives or conduct their business.

Politics is about personal philosophies as much as legislation, said Ken Davidson, a regular at Mom’s Kitchen Cafe in Otis who has lived nearly all his 69 years in Otis or in nearby Akron.

“It’s about our beliefs out here,” he said. “We believe in hard work, self-reliance, family values. And we live off this land out here, so we have to take care of it.”

“The Colorado Democrats are taking the correct steps to try to cut into the Republican advantage in these predominantly Republican areas, but Republicans are not just sitting on their hands. They’re also trying to speak to and mobilize that electorate,” said Kyle Saunders, an associate professor of political science at Colorado State University.

Among the bills Democrats have offered but not yet passed are broadband Internet for remote communities, $750,000 more for rural economic development, money and flexibility for rural schools, medical help by telephone and a $250 million plan to bolster agriculture and equine innovation at Denver’s National Western Complex.

But any political gains either party might have made have been muddied by rehashing issues that have roiled conservative rural voters the past two years: gun rights, gay rights and the renewable-energy mandate.

“I vote for the man, not the party,” said Ronald Mars, 31, a truck driver who lives near Wray. “Most of the candidates I agree with, though, are Republicans.”

Democrats killed any effort to change renewable-energy standards, as well as all of the GOP attempts to repeal the gun-control laws. But when Democratic Rep. Joe Salazar, D-Thornton, suggested a compromise to raise an ammunition magazine limit from 15 to 30 rounds, Capitol conservatives split and chose no compromise over twice as many bullets.

Democrats also have picked fights unpopular in conservative country. The party has opposed a fetal homicide bill. And Salazar’s bill to ban American Indian mascots was called meddling by communities where allegiances to tradition at their country schools run deep.

Nationally, Hillary Rodham Clinton had little to say about rural America when she r eleased the video announcing her presidential run April 12. In the 2-minute, 18-second video, she shows 11 demographics “getting started” — a Hispanic family business, a college graduate looking for a job, a young couple renovating their home who hope to get the dog to stop eating the trash.

Beyond footage showing a backyard garden, there were no farmers, farm issues or obvious rural communities.

Colorado Farm Bureau president Don Shawcroft, a cattle rancher in the San Luis Valley, said the statehouse tends to be too partisan, and “neither party is totally at fault or totally innocent.”

“This war on rural Colorado is overplayed, because these (issues) are things that affect all of Colorado equally,” he said, citing the importance of agriculture, a $40 billion industry that puts three times more money than outdoor recreation into the state economy.

“I don’t think they get that in Denver sometimes.”

Political wounds

They get it in Otis, where two dozen locals convened over coffee and football-sized platters of country cooking at 7 a.m. on a Tuesday at Mom’s, a converted general store in a tiny plains town where buildings that once bustled with business are rotting to pieces.

Inevitably, talk turned to state politics and hard feelings toward the Capitol “when we get tired of kicking Obama around,” joked Republican Stanley Green, 58, who lives outside of town and says his parents and grandparents were Democrats.

Folks recounted grievances with statehouse Democrats who in 2013 — as locals see it — took away gun rights, raised electricity prices for the sake of renewable energy, passed civil unions for gay couples and failed to pass legislation to create reservoirs or pipe much-needed water into arid growing regions.

Eleven counties considered secession later that year. Five of them voted in favor of forming a 51st state lampooned as “Weldorado” for the region’s biggest county.

A year later Democrats paid a price at the polls. The Eastern Plains flipped to the GOP at least five decades ago, but voter turnout spiked in almost every county in 2014.

With overwhelming support from rural voters, Yuma Republican Cory Gardner ousted Boulder County Democrat Mark Udall in the U.S. Senate race

Democrat Gov. John Hickenlooper won re-election by 3 percentage points thanks to Front Range voters and his crossover appeal to some establishment Republicans. Nonetheless, he lost all 18 Eastern Plains counties. In 10 of them, rancher, former congressman and Republican nominee Bob Beauprez won with 70 percent or better.

The governor’s chief political strategist, Alan Salazar, said a comeback by Democrats next year depends on pressing economic issues in rural areas to show how their policies put money into rural communities and into people’s bank accounts.

“It’s gravy, not guns,” Salazar said.

In 2013, before the secession attempt after the statehouse gun debate, “the messaging was all wrong,” he said. “The message came across as, ‘We’re not listening, and we think they’re bad people.’ You can’t win with that.”

Perceived slights from the cities have tumbled across the plains for at least a generation, some out here said.

“Colorado isn’t Denver and everybody else, but that’s the way it’s been treated for a long time,” said Randy Thomas, 63, as she waited at Mom’s for her 90-year-old father, LeMoyne Wolfe, who used to run the local filling station.

Better left alone

Gardner was a state legislator from 2005 to 2011, when he was elected to Congress. He said statehouse politicians get in trouble by listening to policy wonks and party strategists instead of country voters and rural legislators.

In rural Colorado “they want to keep their guns,” he said.

“They want to raise their children the way they want. They want to be able to raise their cattle and make a living, and they don’t want someone to tell them what’s best for them.”

Without showing some deference to rural values — be they guns or less regulation — Democrats’ arguments are likely to continue to go unheard across the country.

Katy Atkinson, a Denver Republican who often works on nonpartisan statewide ballot measures, said Democrats could have a hard time erasing the widely held rural perception that “Denver doesn’t care about them.”

“What they have to do is listen to the things rural Colorado tells them is important and not say, ‘These are the things that are important to you,’ ” she said. “They’re not going to love you because you’re doing what you think they should care about. They’ll love you if you do the things they tell you they care about.

” … In 2013, they did the complete opposite of what people in rural Colorado care about.”

Nathan Weathers, 32, a third-generation farmer in Yuma County, traveled two hours to Denver, parked downtown for $15 and sat through six hours of statehouse testimony two years ago.

He eventually got to say his three-minute piece against the renewable-energy mandate that he contends will cost him tens of thousands of dollars in higher electricity to run his field sprinklers.

He assumed the Democrat-led committee had its mind made up before he ever left home.

“We have to do it,” he said, working in the giant tractor barn on the family’s 2,500-acre spread between Yuma and Wray. “There’s so few of us out here that we don’t have a choice.”

He was preparing this week to plant corn, wheat and potatoes, run a 200-head cattle operation and pay electricity bills jacked up by the 2013 renewable-energy requirement.

“It’s nice that they’re having press conferences and talking about us out here and everything,” Weathers said. “But I talked to some of our county commissioners about this, about what we need, and what we really need is for them to just leave us alone. They’re going to regulate us out of business.”

Joey Bunch was a reporter for 12 years at The Denver Post before leaving to join The Gazette in Colorado Springs. For various newspapers he has covered the environment, water issues, politics, civil rights, sports and the casino industry. He likes stories more than reports.

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